Ask Lemmy

I prefer pay walls if I can buy a single article. I hate how everything is a subscription now.

Neither; use FOSS!

But in all seriousness, ads. They may be filled with trackers from big tech to try to know my every waking thought and sell them, but I have handy dandy software to deal with that.

Ads. But only when the ad doesn't stan.

The ones that invade privacy, I feel, are taking too much advantage.

It depends.

Ads for something I use rarely or am not quite sure about.

But I pay for Netflix, and I suppose that's a paywall.

What's super annoying is when a website has both, and they autoplay. Like most news sites, and if you pause Netflix, something else will start playing, with sound even. I want to pay for what I use... but dayum.

I honestly think services like Apple News plus would be worth subscribing to if they didn’t charge so much and didn’t have ads. Having a “newspass” service where you could just pay $5 to bypass paywalls across multiple sites would be worth the money. The problem is that providers are addicted to that sweet ad revenue, so even paying a subscription fee on most sites means you’re still seeing annoying ads.

The question is a bit loaded, since "prefer ads" means you see the content, whereas "prefer paywalls" means you don't.

A fairer framing would have been: "how do you prefer to pay for content?"

Because, contrary to many opinions here, there is a price to pay when you watch an ad. At the very least, you're paying with your sanity. And very possibly you're paying with your wallet too, later, when you buy some product or service you don't really need. If ads didn't work, there wouldn't be so many of them.

Next, in a world where content is funded by advertising, the people who control our tech have an infernal incentive to spy on us - so we all end up paying with our privacy.

Advertising is the lifeblood of consumer capitalism. It's what powers the pseudo-needs and pseudo-desires and status competition that drives all that material throughput of JUNK that is killing our planet. That price tag is gonna be pretty hefty.

Advertising is sheer poison. But paywalls are not the enemy. It is not immoral to pay for things that have value.

Paywalls, but the content has to be absolutely stellar for me to consider paying for an account.

I prefer ads because I can block them. 👍

I keep telling people but if they keep using ad blockers, then they can expect less content to be available for free. Yet they all want to act like they're not responsible for this trend even though they are.

Most types of ads can be blocked with uBlock Origin, while only some kinds of paywalls can be skipped with Bypass Paywalls Clean. Ads are the most privacy invasive monetization solution and with ad blocking becoming more common, I don't think ads are a sustainable way to fund content in the future. Still, I would prefer to see voluntary subscription and donation options rather than hard paywalls.

Make your content good enough and be a good enough person so that people are willing to give you money voluntarily or for token rewards. Let those with the means subsidize those without.

Occasionally you see something and the comments are full of "let me throw money at you". Maybe at least partially try that as a goal rather than searching for infinite growth at the expense of anyone who isn't an executive.

Obviously I don't like either and I love both ad blockers and tools that bypass paywalls.

But if forced to choose: I prefer ads. Here's why - there's no way I could reasonably afford to sign up for and pay for everything, if it was all behind a paywall. So I'd only have access to and be able to save a limited number of articles for myself.

But if it's just ad heavy, it's more accessible and I can still save it. The range of what I'd be able to save and retain is much larger this way.

Depends on the site. Ads don't bother me because ad block. I support paywalls in the case of sign up for some services, like InsaneJournal. Though, I otherwise have no preference either way since I usually don't go places with paywalls and when I do, I usually find a way to bypass them.

The question isn't really "ads or subs" these days, it's "your data or your dollar", and in this situation there is no good option (since your dollar is the perfect identifier for your data!).